Saturday, July 16, 2016

From Thomas Sugrue's review (NYT, June 26, 2016) of Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.

She argues that British colonizers saw their North American empire as a
place to dump their human waste: the idle, indigent and criminal...

In the book’s most ingenious passages, Isenberg offers a catalog of the
insulting terms well-off Americans used to denigrate their economic
inferiors. In 17th-century Virginia, critics of rebellious indentured
servants denounced them as society’s “offscourings,” a term for fecal
matter. A hundred years later, elites railed against the “useless
lubbers” of “Poor Carolina,” a place she calls the “first white trash
colony.” In the early 19th century, landowners described the landless
rural poor as boisterous, foolish “crackers” and idle, vagabond
“squatters”...

By
the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th, Isenberg shows,
crude caricatures gave way to seemingly scientific explanations of
lower-class status. “Class was congenital,” she writes, summarizing a
mid-19th-century view of poor whites. One writer highlighted the
“runtish forefathers” and “consumptive parents” who birthed a “notorious
race” of inferior white people. Essayists described human differences
by borrowing terminology from specialists in animal husbandry. Just as
dogs could be distinguished by their breeds and horses distinguished
from mules, so could people be characterized as superior or inferior
based on their physical traits.

By
the late 19th century, some writers used family genealogies to trace
the roots of criminality, illness and insanity, and warn of the dangers
of “degeneration.” By the early 20th century, armed with increasingly
sophisticated statistical tools and new understandings of genetics,
eugenicists offered the most chilling of responses to poor whites: They
argued that the state should use its power to keep them from
reproducing. Those arguments shaped one of the Supreme Court’s most
notorious decisions, Buck v. Bell (1927), in which the court, with
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing for the majority, upheld a
Virginia sterilization program to prevent “generations of imbeciles”
from proliferating and thus to keep the nation from being “swamped with
incompetence.”

The
story of eugenics offers an example of the ways that, throughout the
American past, questions of class status have been entangled with
notions of racial inferiority. Isenberg makes a strong case that one of
the most common ways of stigmatizing poor people was to question their
racial identity. Backcountry vagabonds were often compared unfavorably
with the “savage,” nomadic Indian. Sun-browned tenant farmers faced
derision for their less-than-white appearance. After the emancipation of
slaves, politicians warned of the rise of a “mongrel” nation, fearful
that white bloodlines would be contaminated by blacks, a process that
might expand the ranks of “trash” people.

(Sugrue also makes this critique of the book: "a history of class in America that assumes its whiteness and relegates
the nonwhite poor to the backstage is one that misses the fundamental
reality of economic inequality in American history, that race and class
were — and are — fundamentally entwined.")

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About Me

Professor of Anthropology, University of Arkansas. Author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936-39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Co-editor of Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture and of Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity.